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Who says holiday music has to be treacle? In the hands of accomplished jazz musicians, familiar tunes become new, sugary ballads pick up spice and original compositions deepen our appreciation of the season. Certainly that's the case this year, with a group of strong recordings that bring out the best in Christmas repertoire but really bear hearing all year long: Irving Mayfield's Jazz Playhouse: "A New Orleans Creole Christmas" (Basin Street Records). The spirit of the Crescent City permeates this jubilant recording, one of the most evocative, life-affirming Christmas recordings of the year. Trumpeter Mayfield, a well-known figure in New Orleans who was seen in the...

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Who says holiday music has to be treacle?
In the hands of accomplished jazz musicians, familiar tunes become new, sugary ballads pick up spice and original compositions deepen our appreciation of the season.
Certainly that's the case this year, with a...

Hitting its 20th anniversary milestone this year, the Black Harvest Film Festival runs through the month of August at the Gene Siskel Film Center, spotlighting black cinema. The fest hasn't always been especially discerning about quality. I'm not sure...

There's a good chance you will cross paths with one of the many projects filming in Chicago this summer — especially if you work or live downtown. After all, there are three major-studio movies and five (possibly six) TV series scheduled to shoot in and...

Alan Cheuse looks at three new thrillers with a Washington, D.C. theme that are worth checking out.
"Top Down" by Jim Lehrer, Random House, 208 pages, $26
The devastating work of an international shooter appears in Newshour veteran Jim...

"Lee Daniels 'The Butler," "12 Years A Slave" and the ABC drama "Scandal" were among the top nominees for the 45th NAACP Image Awards, which celebrate the accomplishments of people of color in film, TV, music and literature....

When Alan Sepinwall was hired as a TV critic just out of college in 1996, he had no way of knowing he was about to witness “a big bang of sorts,” as he puts it in his new book "The Revolution Was Televised: The Cops, Crooks, Slingers and Slayers...

It's been two decades since the maverick Los Angeles homicide detective Hieronymus "Harry" Bosch made his debut in Michael Connelly's first novel, "The Black Echo." In 18 novels over that span, the hard-charging, short-tempered,...

There was one line Ben Affleck didn't want to deliver in the new movie "Gone Girl," according to director David Fincher:
"I'm so sick and tired of being picked apart by women."
In the scene a woman is, in fact, filleting Affleck's...

Anwan Glover, who appeared in three seasons of "The Wire," was stabbed inside a Washington D.C. nightclub early Sunday, police said.
About 2 a.m. Sunday, a man approached Glover inside the Cafe Asia nightclub in the 1700 block of I Street in...

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Amazon Studios has put into production three comedy pilots as the online retail giant deepens its investment in original content for its Prime Instant Video streaming service.
The studio struck deals with several established Hollywood writers and...

The Discovery Channel has struck pay dirt with reality shows such as "Gold Rush," "Gold Fever," "Jungle Gold" and "Bering Sea Gold." Now Discovery is digging for treasure in a new vein with its first scripted...

In "Mind Games," a new ABC drama-with-comedy premiering Tuesday, Steve Zahn and Christian Slater play brothers setting themselves up in the manipulation business.
"We change people's minds without them knowing we did it," is how...

Hieronymus "Harry" Bosch has put away a cavalcade of criminals and ne'er-do-wells during his 20-plus years as an LAPD homicide detective, all the time sticking to his strict code of ethics and sense of justice.
But while Bosch — the creation of...

Every city has its own singular character — just ask Minneapolis about St. Paul — but there is perhaps no American city as singularly singular, as stubbornly exotic, as attached to its difference as New Orleans, that funky little cosmopolis set down in...

"Diner" has resonated with Baltimore-connected writers and moviemakers across the popular and literary spectrum. Here are some of their reactions to the movie's 30th anniversary.
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With Felicia "Snoop" Pearson's guilty plea last week to conspiracy to sell heroin, one question being asked by fans of "The Wire" is how other cast members of the Baltimore-based series are doing. The answer: Several are doing just...